Visualizing Online Code Collaboration

Git Live visualizes real-time global activity on online code collaboration platform GitHub. The visualization shows a variety of different GitHub actions, including instances when users “star” (i.e. favorite) one another’s work, propose changes to a piece of code, comment with an issue or suggestion associated with a codebase, or create a new project based on existing code. Anish Athalye, an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who created Git Live, discussed a number of insights from the visualization on his blog, including the fact that overseas collaboration is extremely common and that while most of the code is being created in the United States and Europe, users in other places mainly star others’ work.